


Nothing borne

by HotUtilitarian



Category: I Had a Little Nut Tree (Nursery Rhyme)
Genre: 1910s, F/F, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 17:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10881975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HotUtilitarian/pseuds/HotUtilitarian
Summary: A brother and sister become entangled with a mysterious lady who claims to be the natural daughter of the King of Spain, and some curious events ensue...





	Nothing borne

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



It was not, on the face of it, a setting conducive to telling tales of the uncanny: not the Great Hall of a Tudor manor house, the Yule-log spitting in the grate below the armigerous chimneypiece, nor the smoking-room of a London club, yellow fog swirling up to the sashes as a November dusk falls, nor even a Highland lodge in September, the inmates’ hope of sport curtailed by a gale. It was a blazing day in early June, and the five of us were picnicking by the river, just outside Grantchester. The academic symposium convened by Bailey, which had brought me and my colleague Vaughn to Corpus, had concluded the night before with another, of the character that Alcibiades would have more readily recognised. Craxton, who had been at Oriel with Vaughn, was now a surgeon at Addenbrooke’s; of an athletic disposition and temperate habits, though with an interest in psychiatry, he had come to laugh at our hangovers. We bumped into Reynolds, quite by chance, on Trumpington Street. The person with whom he’d arranged to have luncheon had let him down. From his air of contained disappointment we concluded that the person was not a gentleman, and with the universal and vigorous sympathy of the crapulous, embraced and carried him along, though only Bailey could be said to know him at all.

After a bathe and three bottles of more-than-tolerable hock, a Cambridgeshire meadow in summer is apt to seem Arcadia: the wide blue skies lightly fleeced with cloud, the chirr of birds and buzz of insects, the haze of grass pollen and the dappled shade of the willows, riverine cool and rich silty odour, one’s feeling that the long day shall never wane. And Arcadian too is the knowledge that it assuredly must, for the swains come at length to the foot of the tomb and trace the inscription there, thereby to recognise that they too, will once have been. It was that breath of melancholy, perhaps, that prompted Vaughn to relate a story he had heard in Carcassonne, of a heretic girl and her orthodox lover, who had drowned himself after being tricked into turning her over to the secular arm; I capped it with the one current in my Suffolk childhood, identical, except that it averred, with a sort of vulgar rationalism, that he lit the faggots at her feet. 

Craxton, who still wore only his bathing drawers, flung his arms behind his head and arched his back, displaying an impressive pectoral spread and bulky triceps. ‘What infernal fabulists you fellows are. Is there a plague in the city that we’ve come out here to escape?’ 

‘Not unless you mean the women students.’ said Bailey, settling his clasped hands on the belly that protruded, peach-like, through his open shirtfront. The mild twitting that ensued acknowledged his right, as the only married man among us, to his misogyny, and the conversation proceeded to women’s colleges, and by degrees, to the queer case of ‘Miss Morison’ and ‘Miss Lamont’, upon which Craxton spoke with some animation in the dialect peculiar to his profession, whose vocabulary is by turns briskly clinical and exceedingly coarse. No-one paid any attention to Reynolds, who sat fully clothed at a slight distance and social disadvantage, until he rose to his feet and said, almost pleasantly, ‘I do not believe I have yet arrived at that stage of clubbability which would countenance without protest such libels upon English womanhood.’ His face was drained, despite the heat and the hock; the prominent Adam’s apple beneath it wagged as if it would be free of his throat. ‘I hope I never shall. Good day.’ 

The dignity of his departure was compromised by the necessity of retrieving his soft, dove-grey hat, but it was not until his stalking limbs were mere pins against the tall sky that any of us spoke. 

‘Oh dear,’ said Vaughn. 

‘What the devil—?’ exclaimed Craxton. His colour and voice were rather high; he wheezed thinly before dropping into a guffaw. ‘Damn it all. I hadn’t thought such probity had survived the old Queen.’ 

‘I’m not sure it has,’ Bailey ventured. ‘I mean, in poor old Reynolds’ case it’s personal.’ 

My face must have supplied a third iteration of the quizzical look on Vaughn’s and Craxton’s, because Bailey grimaced and said, ‘Well, it’s gossip. Old gossip.’ 

‘Apocrypha,’ I suggested. ‘We shall view it in that light.’ 

‘Oh, I’m not sure I—it’s about the chap’s sister, you know.’ 

‘Queen Victoria _is_ dead,’ Vaughn coaxed. 

Bailey sighed and rolled his eyes. ‘Really, it’s so unlikely as to be almost a fairy tale. But I suppose if _I_ know it, it does fall more or less in the public domain.’ 

We nodded vigorously, and he began. 

‘His sister’s name was Jane. She was a little older than Reynolds, two or three years. Their father farmed about eight hundred acres of Devon. He died unexpectedly when they were quite babies—broke his neck hunting—and his lady couldn’t cope. A succession of incompetent and crooked managers came and went, and in the end they couldn’t afford to stay in the house—decaying Palladian pile—so they let it, and moved into the lodge. Their tenant was a Mrs James Harris, a somewhat misleading cog, for she was one of these Continental dames, a citizen of the world.’ 

‘They always turn out to be artificial florists from Wolverhampton,’ said Vaughn. 

‘Hm. She certainly sounds a rum un. But she was very rich, and she dressed stylishly, bold colours, crimson and royal blue; in looks she was rather the belle laide type, dark hair and sleepy eyes. She spoke excellent English, with an alluring Castilian lisp. She gave out that as a girl she’d been part of the household of the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, and implied as heavily as she dared that she was the natural daughter of the king-consort, which if true, would repair that gentleman’s reputation rather than damage it. Then of course there was a tale of intrigue and injustice, Cruel Capricious Queen Isabella, and so forth, and she and her poor consumptive mama were cast out of the royal sight, which killed Mama in short order, leaving her to live on her wits.’ 

Craxton made an unnecessary remark about the typical posture in which feminine wit is deployed to pecuniary advantage. 

‘Eventually,’ Bailey continued, an edge of reproach in his voice, ‘after many adventures, she made her way to Oporto, where she met and married James Harris; he was some score of years older than she, and they had no children. All that seems close to the facts, because there was no doubt about the port-wine fortune she inherited. Her time among the British of Oporto gave her a great curiosity about the land that had produced these eccentric people, with their unsuitable food, their inexplicable games and their large ham fists and faces, so when her mourning was up, she set off for England. She took Shilcote, the Reynolds’ place, initially on a year’s lease, though she stayed much longer, in the end. 

‘Having none of her own, she grew fond of the children, often had them up to the house for tea and so forth, the whole aunt-routine. Reynolds was actually the more enthusiastic, to begin with: if you know him even slightly you know what he is for his bibelots, and this was the _fons et origo_ of it all. Mrs Harris had an enormous collection, probably mostly acquired from curiosity shops, but just the sort of thing that children like: cow creamers and toy porringers and music boxes. Their mutual favourite, though, was a salver with a cashew tree modelled in silver sprouting from the middle of it, by all accounts a very fine piece of work. The fruits were detachable, made in gold and silver. Mrs Harris claimed it was wrought upon the occasion of the marriage of Mariana Victoria to Prince José of Portugal, and God knows, that might even have been the truth. Anyway, they made quite a cult of it, always putting it at the centre of their elaborate make-believe plays, which Mrs Harris energetically directed. 

‘The year after Mrs Harris arrived, Reynolds went to school, and he came back the complete Wykehamist, relentlessly civilised. Embarrassed by the reminders of what now seemed a rather precious boyhood, he called on Mrs Harris no more often than courtesy demanded; Jane became in proportion closer to her. You know my thoughts upon schoolgirls, and laugh at ‘em, I know, quite the relic of last century, or even the one before. But you came along Grange Road, gentlemen, just as I did, and you saw the result: the shapeless serge and wispy buns, the lamentable complexions, either wan or chapped and rough. It could only be worse if they wore gowns. No, I stick to it: nine-tenths of women make better wives and mothers for being kept at home. It is a grave error to think that ours is the pragmatic sex: institutional life for the majority of women only hardens their native matter-of-factness into a crude utilitarianism. _Unnaturalness_ , though a danger, pales beside an _excess_ of feminine nature—that is, true femininity, which is brisk to the point of brutality.’ 

We were all now thinking of Mrs Bailey, a tremendous woman in her way, and seeming to recognise this, Bailey shifted on his hams, looked down, fastened a shirt button and cleared his throat. ‘However, we might say that Jane Reynolds belonged to the ten percentum who might have done with a touch of stiffening. A very impressionable girl, and she had little in the way of sober and reasonable influence to counter Mrs Harris’ romancing: only her sickly mother, and a timid governess terrified she would lose her place if she got on the wrong side of the formidable tenant of Shilcote Hall. 

‘One vacation—Reynolds must have been by this time in that awkward interim between boy- and manhood, when no-one can be taken very seriously—he became aware that not only did his sister, a great girl of eighteen, still playact with her friend (who was in her middle forties), but that their pastime had taken a turn from the mere charades that he remembered, to something almost Theosophical in tendency. The nut-tree still held its central place, now, though, as a kind of fetish, meditation upon which would summon visions of past ages. Mrs Harris now seemed openly to claim that the blood of Bourbon ran in her veins, and that she had an especial astral connexion with those spirits who were daughters of the Kings of Spain. Worried for his sister’s mental stability, but unable to confide his fears to their mother, who suffered extremely from a weak heart, he pretended a a great interest in Jane’s accounts of the séances, hoping to get himself invited to one. 

‘In this he succeeded, but unfortunately, the day appointed was one much like today, and he had spent the afternoon bathing with the farm manager’s son, a handsome young man whom Reynolds was anxious to impress and emulate by demonstrating a head for West Country cider. He made it to tea at the Hall, but saw no more than the two women holding hands over the nut tree and singing a Spanish nursery rhyme before he fell sound asleep. He woke to the smell of tobacco, but the gentleman responsible for that odour had clearly been and gone in the time he’d been laid out. Much abashed, he asked his sister what had happened. She simply laughed and said he played the part of Philip the Fair to perfection. The name meant little to him, but when he looked it up he was much perturbed to read of Joanna the Mad’s infamous conduct with that prince’s corpse. Having presented himself intoxicated in a lady’s drawing-room, however, he scarcely occupied very secure ground from which to make any sort of accusation. A curt acknowledgement came from Mrs Harris accepting his note of apology, but he was not received again for the rest of the vac. 

‘A few days before he was due to go back to school, Jane and he happened to be speaking of the origins of the English Reformation. As it happened, Mrs Harris attended Sunday service in the village church, having become accustomed to the Anglican form during her marriage, but the usual things were said about clandestine papistry. That she might be a Romish she-wolf seeking to bring Jane over had not, until now, entered Reynolds’ head, which was, unlike that of the local peasantry, not mired in the sectarian mental habits of two centuries before. In any case Mrs Harris had always seemed of a slightly anti-clerical bent, speaking with disgust of the Inquisition and with warm admiration of Pombal. That consternation proved only momentary, to be replaced by one much greater, for Jane proved a vigorous defender of the view that Henry had indeed transgressed the prohibition mentioned in Leviticus 20:21. Startled into indiscretion, Reynolds ventured that according to the bride’s testimony the union of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon had been a marriage in name only. 

‘ “Oh no, it was not!” exclaimed Jane. 

‘Reynolds cringed, not knowing if he could support hearing those indelicate words concerning a mug of ale upon his sister’s lips. 

‘ “Pooh,’ he said lightly. How can anyone know? 

‘ “I know,” she said, “because I was there!” 

‘Despite his horror at this sign of open insanity, Reynolds retained sufficient presence of mind to humour her, to find out what, exactly, she believed she had seen. He was nonetheless in a very great fear and trembling, for at best what he was about to hear suggested a moral imbecility in her, and at worst—well, we have all had the imaginations of boys of sixteen, there’s no need to elaborate. He remembered, in short, the smell of tobacco. He even began to wonder, having found in the course of a few more experiments with the farm manager's son and his scrumpy that his capacity was in excess of the quart and a half he'd consumed on that occasion, if some soporific agent had not been introduced to his tea. 

'Fortunately though, it was all quite tame: Jane's vision had been from the viewpoint of a lady-in-waiting disrobing Princess Katharine for her wedding night, and though richly detailed, contained nothing not in the historical record of that royal bedding. He could be fairly sure that she was still properly innocent of the act for which it was preparation. But she was mad. Mrs Harris had made her mad. He tried to talk to his mother, but she first dismissed his concerns as typical masculine solemnity over the frivolous amusements of ladies, then proceeded to tease him for jealousy: the thought that he might appear to be enamoured of Mrs Harris mortified and disgusted him, but he couldn't let the thing drop. His subsequent attempt to confront Jane in their mother's presence was a humiliating failure: Jane insisting that she and Mrs Harris simply discussed, in their ignorant, womanly way, stories that had especially moved them from books of popular history, and occasionally wrote out playlets of them to read to one another. Reynolds' persistence only led to an unseemly row, and he returned to school without a sister's kiss or a mother's blessing. 

‘Some weeks into the school term he received a letter from his mother, saying that Mrs Harris had some business affairs to conduct in Portugal, and proposed that Jane go with her for a holiday; that she had hesitated before writing, because of his foolishness before he went away, but she understood it was motivated only by worry for his sister, she quite forgave him. He wrote by return, begging her not to give her consent to the tour, but this Mrs Reynolds wholly disregarded. He asked for permission from the Headmaster to go home, but owing to his bashfulness over the reason, this was refused. He resolved to go without leave, but arriving in Devon found that Mrs Harris and Jane had departed for Plymouth the day before, and were doubtless by then on the sea. Moreover, his ill-planned flight had been discovered, and a telegram from the Headmaster, requesting him not to return to the College until after Christmas, anticipated him. While he languished in rusticated disgrace, news came of the sinking of the steamer _Nyneve_ in the Bay of Biscay—perhaps you remember it? The captain survived, poor fool, and nineteen passengers, but Mrs Harris and Miss Reynolds were not among them. 

‘The shock was too great for Mrs Reynolds: her rheumatic heart gave way almost upon the instant. Reynolds was sent to live with a cousin he barely knew, though came vividly to dislike, a hearty Philistine sort of chap who made no secret of his view that Reynolds was an unspeakable decadent, and I think Reynolds played up to it as a form of perverse retaliation. Mrs Harris left no will, an extraordinary thing considering her wealth, or perhaps none was ever found, and her fortune passed to a distant relative of her husband’s. But the queerest part of the story is this. Mrs Harris had taken the nut tree salver with her on the journey, or at least, it could not be found among the effects left behind at Shilcote. The year afterwards Reynolds received in the post one of the gold and silver fruits. Nothing else, no note. Just the trinket in a small box. The stamp was Portuguese but the postmark unreadable. Reynolds told his cousin, who forbade him pursue it, fearing the infamy that might accrue, perhaps even involvement in a lawsuit of the Tichborne sort. But the next year, around the time of the anniversary of Jane’s supposed drowning, another came, and the following year another, always from a different European city. The cousin still refused to let Reynolds pursue the matter, but upon his majority he sunk what remained of his substance into an investigation, private detectives and so forth. No trace was ever found of the two women. There were two dozen fruit on the little nut tree, and now, I believe, he has twenty-three of them.’ 

It would be a fine, pathetic effect could I say that the sun, unnoticed by any of us, had disappeared behind a cloud, a breeze had started to whip up along the river, and evening shades lengthened over the swaying reeds. None of that happened: the sun beat down relentlessly, the blue air was still, and Bailey’s story had taken only about a quarter of an hour to relate. And yet we were all changed by it, as surely as if the scene around us had undergone a dreary convulsion. Vaughn crossed his arms and clapped his shoulders, grimacing to realise they had sustained a sunburn, Bailey squinted and groped around for his pipe and pouch, there was gooseflesh on Craxton’s brawny thighs. For my part, I would happily have packed the baskets and left straight away, but we all hung on for another half hour, chatting desultorily but rather desperately, as if to pretend to ourselves we had not been visited, and touched, by the sinister, delusive spirit of Mrs James Harris. 

Reynolds never received the twenty-fourth fruit. In August the war began, and in September he was killed at the Marne.

**Author's Note:**

> 'the swains come at length to the foot of the tomb and trace the inscription there...': the narrator is thinking of [this painting](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_-_Et_in_Arcadia_ego_\(deuxi%C3%A8me_version\).jpg).
> 
> 'Is there a plague in the city that we’ve come out here to escape?': The set up for Bocaccio's [Decameron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron).
> 
> 'the queer case of ‘Miss Morison’ and ‘Miss Lamont’': [the Moberly-Jourdain incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incident).
> 
> '...would repair that gentleman’s reputation rather than damage it': Francisco de Asís de Borbón, the king consort of Queen Isabella II (1830-1904) was widely believed not to be the father of some of her children. 
> 
> Grange Road: passing Newnham, a women's college. At the date this fic is set, women studying at Cambridge were not considered members of the university, and so did not wear gowns as male undergraduates did.
> 
> 'Joanna the Mad’s infamous conduct with that prince’s corpse': Joanna of Castile (1479-1555) allegedly refused to bury the body of her husband, Philip the Fair, and insisted upon keeping the coffin with her.
> 
> Pombal: the Marquess de Pombal (1699-1782), anti-clerical Portuguese statesman.
> 
> Leviticus 20:21: states that a man's marriage to his brother's widow will be punished with childlessness, a central plank in Henry VIII's case for divorcing Katharine of Aragon.
> 
> 'those indelicate words concerning a mug of ale...': On emerging from his bedchamber the morning after his wedding, Prince Arthur is alleged to have called for ale, saying he was thirsty after 'being in the midst of Spain', words which were claimed by Henry VIII to have indicated that his older brother's marriage to Katharine had been consummated, and his own therefore invalid.


End file.
